I'm in my third coop game. Suddenly i hear an explosion noise. And another. And another. Every 20 seconds or so there is this strange explosion noise and me and my coop partner are confused. What is happening? We see no alerts or messages, nothing bad is happening in our systems. Is this a bug? I was googling like mad, but didn't find anything useful. So we decided to just ignore it for now and continue playing. After a while we noticed our scouts are dying and suddenly we get notfications about something called "EMP Guardian". What happened is there was this small fleet with said guardian. They went from AI System to AI System, fired the guardians weapons and proceded to kill all the scouts they could find. That devious little smart bastard! I love it!

But a small advice to the developers: New players are really confused by those noises. We were like: What does the game try to tell us? Do we have to do something? Is the game bugged? Maybe the game shouldnt play those explosion noises, if the player cant even see the Guardian.

just got back into the game after about 2 years and thought i would chime in.

EMP guardians plus sniper guardians=instant death. seriously, i was a good way through an 8/8 game and gave up after i realized this combo meant certain death. the only way i managed to counter it was by putting my fleet inside transports on a planet that i thought the ai would hit next, then unloading the transport right after the guardians showed up. i still lost the command station but the attacking force was dealt with. unfortunately, this didn't stop the ai from doing it again, and again. so, not wanting to deal with it i just gave up.